The article was only 900 words long, but its contents helped usher in a
revolution. With bland understatement, James Watson, then 25, a freshly
minted Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University, and Francis Crick, a
36-year-old dropout from physics who had developed a belated interest
in biochemistry, announced the solution to a puzzle that had stymied
the scientific world. Though neither was especially equipped by
training or experience for so challenging a task, they had unraveled
the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the...